National Adoption Awareness Month

8 Ways to Celebrate

By Michele St. Martin

November is National Adoption Awareness month. According to the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC), "The primary purpose of Adoption Month is to raise awareness about adoption, adoptive families and children who need adoptive homes. If done well, awareness-raising efforts represent adoptive families in a positive manner."

There are many ways to promote adoption. Some take little thought or planning, while others involve more, but it's often easier than you think. Don't let November pass by without doing something to acknowledge the importance of adoption in your life. The following are just a few ways that you can make a difference:

Bea Rothweiler, a mom from Minneapolis, Minn., will celebrate Adoption Awareness Month the same way she always does – by talking to her daughter's classmates about adoption and reading them one of their favorite storybooks. It's become a family tradition for Rothweiler to go to her daughter's school and share their story. "We read A Mother for Choco (Putnam, 1996) and share a LifeBook of our daughter's story of us becoming a family. We usually open the session up for questions," she says.

Other parents have donated books about adoption to school libraries, talked with their children's teachers to make sure that class projects are adoption-friendly, talked with their children's classes about their child's country of origin and helped provide the teacher with adoption-friendly resources.

Some parents have written letters to the editor of their local newspapers on adoption-related topics or asked the newspaper to run adoption-related stories during November. Other parents have contacted television stations or radio stations. By law, broadcast media must devote time and resources to various sorts of public service announcements. Plan ahead on this one – contact the station's public affairs department, and maybe next November you'll see an adoption-friendly public service announcement on your local television station.

Want to see more?

• A Happy Ending: Our Adoption Experience
• Domestic Adoption: Building a Family
• The Adoption Homestudy: Necessary Evil or Helpful Experience?
• Talk about it!